The 10 commandments of a professional web hosting company
By: Detlev Reimar The 10 commandments of a professional web hosting company
by Detlev Reimer
You will certainly know the problem if you ever wanted to bring your new and
professionally designed web pages online : Which hosting company should you
choose ? After all, there are hundreds or even thousands of them. What are
the key aspects you, as an Internet marketer, have to watch out for ?
01. Service/Support
It is very important that you always have someone to talk to if you have
made a deal with a hosting company. If your web site is down for several
hours it might cost you hundreds or for some of us even thousands of dollars
in sales. Fast action is necessary then, so it's vital to your business that
you can reach them 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Another thing to watch
out for is professional assistance for installing/uploading scripts or
complete web sites if you're not familiar with it.
02. Reliability
The uptime of a server should be at least 99% . The best thing is if the
company can provide mirror servers which will be accessible if the hardware
server has to be maintained or the like. Look out for testimonials at their
site. If they don't have them , ask if they can provide you with some email
addresses of satisfied customers which you can ask about it.
03. Cost Effectiveness
It would not make sense to choose a hosting company that offers all
important features but costs you a small fortune each month. No hosting with
the here mentioned basics should cost you more than $20 per month. Anything
above that would be a waste of your dollars. This is meant for home based
businesses, though. Professional high budget companies might have to meet
different criteria.
04. Modern Hardware
You need to make sure that the hosting company uses the best, fastest and
most reliable servers you can get for your money. If the speed of the
servers can not keep up with the demand of web pages for your domain, your
web site will slow down and might take ages to load. Again, look out for
testimonials.
05. Autoresponders
An autoresponder is something that every serious business person with a web
site should have. If you're e.g. on vacation, you will be able to send your
customers and prospects a customized, automated email about that. That makes
you and your business look more professional and you want to have that
autoresponder coming from your own domain and not some third party
autoresponder.
A great program for sending follow-up mailings is AutoResponsePlus
and the web host needs to
have certain things enabled to use it. You certainly don't want to lose
customers because you did not answer your emails for some weeks... So check
out if your host fulfills your requirements for installing your own
autoresponders.
If you don't want to install one but rather want to use a service then the
one I'm recommending right now is called ProAutoresponder
.
06. Enough POP-email Accounts
It is important that you have some mechanism in place to sort out your
emails automatically into different folders. If you have enough email
addresses to use, you can file them into these folders by sorting them
according to the receiver email address. e.g. all article submissions for
your ezine go into folder from the email address articles@domain.com . You
want to make sure that your email addresses reflect your domain name if
you're an online marketer. POP-email account means that you can use any
email client to automatically receive your incoming emails. You don't need
to login on a web site and check your emails there. This can be a very
tedious and time consuming task. A Hotmail or Zwallet account is not
advisable for any professional business emails!
07. Free CGIs
There are a lot of cgi programs available which will enhance the functions
of your web site. These options include using scripts for automatic
capturing of email addresses with little pop-up boxes like Opt-in Lightning.
Then you must upload that script to your /cgi-bin directory to make it work.
Just uploading to your web space will not do the job. Other possibilities
for these scripts are tracking features for your ads so you can directly see
how successful your advertising campaigns have been.
08. Enough Web Space Included
In the beginning, you will be tempted to go with the lowest amount of web
space included because you might be on a tight budget. After all, those web
pages just have a size of just a few kb , so most will not even reach 100 kb
per web page. But you have to think in the future, too. Do you want to offer
a lot of free downloads like software demos, free ebooks and similar items ?
Then you must be prepared that it will take a lot of your space. Also, if
you update your web site frequently (which should be a matter of course),
you will need much of that space.
I have experienced this at first hand with my own web site. I started with
just 10 MB web space and after 4 months it was too small already. If you
have reached your web space limit, you are not able to upload any new
content and files to your web site and you might have to wait a week or so
before you have upgraded your web space ..! This could mean a delay in your
marketing activities, you don't want to risk that, do you ?
09. Enough Bandwidth Included
Most of us will start small if we bring a new web site online, so the need
for bandwidth will not be urgent at that time. But what if your company
grows and with it the traffic that comes to your web site ? Will you have to
pay additional fees because you just have 1 GB transfer volume included ?
I've seen several sites already which were switched off by their hosting
company because they used too much bandwidth.
But you want to have large amounts of traffic, do you ? So make sure that
you don't have to pay for this additional traffic or you wil not be able to
relish your prospering business.... In most cases, 10 GB bandwidth will be
enough even for high traffic sites. If you're offering a lot of downloads,
you might need more than that, though .
10. Extensive statistics
This is one of the most important features a web hosting company should
offer. You will have to analyze where your traffic comes from and how
successful certain advertising campaigns are. You can even set redirect
pages which can be viewed in your statistics so you don't have to use a
tracking service. You must be able to view the referrers, your daily unique
visitors and which pages have been accessed.
If you also can see which keywords at the search engines have lead your
visitors to your site, it can be worth its' weight in gold. You will be
constantly working with this information for improving traffic and
performance of your web site, so you should take this point very seriously.
A last tip from me : Make sure that the company you're working with is at
least two years in business already. You don't want to consign your web site
to an unreliable company who's going bancrupt because they could not handle
their business correctly....
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